Since the last update, I've had issues as well with moving items into and out of my hotbar or character while vanished.

In Rust, all weapons in your inventory are child entities of your player. We sync all of those entities to your local client, so switching weapons doesn't have any delay. However, as an optimization, we only network the visible weapons to other clients. This is done by disabling the entity on the server, which disables networking. The same thing happens for all weapons that are in boxes.

A side effect of this entity hiding mechanism has been that all those entities were considered to be at "world origin" when they are disabled. This could cause significant strain on the server when working with network group subscriptions. To combat this we now move those entities to their own network group instead of reusing the network group at world origin, which completely excludes them from all processing.